1976 Hostess Brown Backs

[JTysver]

Opening up this can of worms again...

From what I can gather, I have seen the following numbers in 1976 as Brown Backs...

37-54
79-81
85-87
91-150

This somewhat follows the release of Ding Dongs and King Dons.

Can anyone verify for me if they have any brown backs numbered from 82-84?
Does anyone have any brown backs numbered from 88-90?

Are there any brown backs from 55-78?
Are there any from 1-36?

[savedfrommyspokes]

I have #83, 84 with brown backs, but no brown backed cards from the other sequences mentioned.

[Zach Wheat]

Jay,

I believe you will find other brown backs and they will be closely correlated to another Hostess set. We had earlier raised this question regarding 1975 Hostess Twinkies. As you may or may not be aware there was a significant amount of discussion which followed the original post.

Eventually, I ran into one of the original dealers that purchased a significant number of test sheets from one of the workers at the original printer. Although my original objective was to determine if corrected Hostess "Black Bar" Twinkies cards existed (they don't - they occur only in non-Black Bar "regular" Hostess cards; Twinkie rarity is perhaps 20:1 over Hostess) I gained a lot of understanding about the creation and subsequent printing of the set.

The original 1975 Hostess set had a number of production issues - from misspellings, food stains, poor photo selection (ITT parent company was allowed to use Topps "2nd" rejected photographs not used in their 1975 set) to differences in ink. Late in the 1975 production year, they were noted as experimenting with the layout & design of the 1976 set. A number of scraps for 1976 set existed in brown backs and other colors.

The dealer indicated he had numerous scraps from this era and that the printer used brown and other colors of ink in place of black as a test. I suspect the population for "other colors" will be in the single digits and probably came from the same scrap sheets. 1976 Brown backs will probably have a correlation to which cards cross over to other sets - as in the 1975 Hostess Twinkies.....but this is just a guess.

Good luck.

Z

[Exhibitman]

So basically your research suggests that the brownies are test pieces that slipped out?

[JTysver]

I’m kind of unclear what this is saying? To which other 1976 sets would these correlate to? The Twinkies set for 1976 is only 1-60 and that doesn’t seem to jive with what I’ve seen. The closest correlation isurmise would be to the King Dons or Ding Dongs distribution.

[toppcat]

I’m kind of unclear what this is saying? To which other 1976 sets would these correlate to? The Twinkies set for 1976 is only 1-60 and that doesn’t seem to jive with what I’ve seen. The closest correlation isurmise would be to the King Dons or Ding Dongs distribution.

I'm just pissed they never marked "King Dongs"

[David W]

While under semi lockdown, I've been cleaning/sorting/organizing thousands of cards in boxes, and found complete boxes (rather beat up) of 76 and 79 Hostess.

The King Dons were all brown backs between numbers 106 to 150.

I found 6 Twinkie boxes, 4 Ho Ho boxes, 1 Suzy Q box, 8 King Dons boxes, 2 Cup Cakes and 1 Crumb Cakes.

Are any of the boxes tougher than the others? I don't ever recall eating a King Dons or a Crumb Cake.

Were any of them more regional?

[Rich Klein]

I know I broke out as many brown backs as I could find on COMC. Not perfect but you can check to see if your suppositions are correct in terms of what cards have brown backs.

Rich

[darkhorse9]

I am still looking for pictures of uncut sheets from the 1977 Twinkies set. My research shows there were four sheets used for that set with different product cuts on each sheet. I've located pictures of three of the sheets but I'm still looking for pictures of that fourth sheet.